“I wonder,” mused Gonfallon, “that He who made space for the infinite and eternity for time should not have created a being capable of mounting sheerly to some fringe of His mantle of stars, instead of a groping phantom incompetent to leave behind so much as a shadow on a wall. I wonder—”
And as he mused he was visited by an idea which at first he repulsed and then beckoned back. It was that however ephemeral life might be, it was yet clothed with radiant possibilities. Throughout the length and breadth of the diocese there was no ecclesiastic more prominent than himself: it was he who would be nominated for the bishopric. While he still mused, the door opened, and Claire appeared.
“Did you miss me, Chris?”
She was in street-costume, a trim skirt, a cloth jacket descending to her waist, her hands cased in suede, her face unveiled, and on her head a low-crowned hat of felt.
“Did you miss me, Chris?”
As she spoke, her lips parted as a flower opens to the sun: he could see the edges of her teeth, and in the lamplight they seemed to reflect the rose of her mouth and tongue.
“And Ruth? Is she no better?”
Her hat she removed and tossed pin-pierced aside. Her jacket she had already unbuttoned, and as she raised her arm to divest herself of it Gonfallon sprang to her aid.
“There, let me help you,” he said.
As he caught at the sleeve, he touched her wrist. From her hair came the clean smell of acorns and of pines that had greeted him the night before; and as he bent to aid her, there was a cleft in her neck which might have tempted a saint.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” he added.
“Thanks, put it anywhere. Oh, didn’t you? I have a key, you know. Pickett came in this afternoon and wanted me to dine with her: her people have gone to Lakewood, and she was alone. What of Ruth?”
She had turned to Gonfallon, who stood, her jacket in his hand. At the question he made a gesture indicative of discouragement.
“Give it me,” she continued. “I will go to her now.” And as she stretched her hand, Gonfallon caught it in his own.
“Sit with me a moment, Claire.”
“I might have a cigarette, don’t you think? Pickett,”—and she ushered a memory with the ripple of her laugh—“Pickett was afraid to have me smoke, on account of the servants.”
She moved from him and drew out a case, a toy of fair gold, on the mirror-like surface of which she glanced at her own reflection.
“Try one,” she added, and extended the case.
“No, Claire, I do not smoke, nor should you. But there,” he continued, hastily, for on the girl’s lips a sudden pout had appeared. “Do as you will.”
“What’s gone wrong? The ten commandments are gayer than you, sir.” And to her lips, from which the pout had retreated, a smile returned.
“You were not annoyed at me last night, were you, Claire?” And as the girl, answering nothing, stood gazing at him, her virginal eyes a trifle dilated, her lips just parted, her head drawn back, he added, huskily, “You know I love you,” and hesitated—for encouragement, perhaps, or else rebuke.
Then, as she seemed about to move from him, he detained her with a gesture that was at once an apology and a plea, the gesture of a mendicant accustomed to rebuff. “Claire, let me tell you. I know, none better, that it is wrong for me to speak to you as I do. I have no excuse. Yet when you came—see, it is but a month ago—you brought a gladness and a sorcery. At first I did not understand, but last night it was as a sense recovered: I knew that all my life I had hungered for you. You were the odor of a feast at which I had longed to sit, the shadow of a hope which I had dreamed to claim. Claire, listen to me. It is not years that make our age: I was old at twenty, I am young today, and it is youth that loves best and most. Let me love you. There, I will ask nothing in return, but I have such need of you! Each emotion I compressed expands to you, every illusion that I lost you can restore. You are to me the fulfilment of an anterior promise, the requital of an earlier mistake. Were I free I would speak to you less gravely, but I am bound as never Tantalus was. I can ask nothing, I can take nothing, I can only give. And there the misery of it is; for my power of giving is slight indeed. Were I master of fate instead of slave, and had you a wish, like a spaniel that wish should nestle at your feet. But this is idle speech; forgive it me. The fact remains, I love you, not alone with all my heart, but as no other has loved you yet, as no other can love you now.”
The initial phrases of this address had come from Gonfallon haltingly, but as he warmed to the work they fell from him in rounded periods, as they were wont to when he preached. And that magnetism which was in him, the electricity which he diffused and which had made him what he was, the foremost ecclesiastic in the largest of provincial cities, seemed now to be
